Mystikan's Weblog

Another upgrade to the Cybersite with a neat bit of Javascript - check out the date/time clock on the header bar! I found a nice little digital clock script at Javascript.com, and spiced it up to display the date as well as the time. If you're into Javascript, you should check out Javascript.com, since they have thousands of cool scripts for your site, all free!

   

Two days till Christmas and all's well. Having some time alone allowed me to perfect another 3D-modelling technique I'd been trying to master for ages - grassy meadows. This is no joke - rendering a field full of grass amounting to millions of polygons without blowing out the octree is quite a challenge. But I've got it under control now, and I've updated a picture in the new Arnagest Gallery with the new technique. Check it out!

   

A new gallery has been added to the Cybersite! For those at Kevin's Watch and LD4all, here are some more images from the Arnagest Universe. If you like 3D art, be sure to check it out!

   

Well, it's been a hectic few months since my last post. But the old web design skills have now been honed to a sharper edge with the practice gained from doing the IHM school website. (Look in the sidebar). And work is now coming in from others who are impressed with what I have to offer, so Mystikan's Cybersite has now received a full revamp with much more professional presentation. With first IHM and now Terran Global Communications completed, it is to be hoped that work will start coming in and get things off the ground!

   

Haven't had a chance to update the blog in a while, being very busy lately. I'm currently doing a website for a local primary school, and in addition I've been working on my Arnagest site, which is coming along nicely and should be online Real Soon Now! And I've just updated the Cybersite with a new set of pages in the Welcome area; I was googling for C64 music the other day and found some blasts from the past on my net journey! I used to be part of a coding crew known as SCC/TAF back in the 1980s, and I found some of our old demos on the C64 Hall Of Fame. So I've added a bit of history about SCC/TAF on the Cybersite and put our old demos up as well. You can see my SCC-TAF Revisited page here.
NOTE: The Welcome and SCC/TAF pages have been removed as of 1/1/2005.

   

Well, it's been a busy few days here! As well has helping Celcius1 get his site up and going I've also added a form mailer to my Contact page. Now people can contact me even more easily! I've used my own mail script rather than a publicly-available one such as FormMail because of spamming concerns and scurity holes. My mail script has my own address hard-coded into it so it's useless to script hijackers for spam forwarding! So, my site's all ready now for when I start my WFD placement later today! Talk about a last-minute touch-up!
NOTE: Celcius1's site has been removed as of 12/11/2004 since he has left NGADLA.

   

Just added cgi functionality to the Cybersite! Having learned a bit of Perl in the last few days, I've now written my own custom hit counter, which you'll have seen on the Cybersite entrance page (and multiple times on the stats page if you've found it! :) Look forward to more cgi functionality appearing soon - this is fun!

While we are on the subject, have a look at Gossland and Perlmonks for some informative and useful Perl scripting tutorials! Many thanks to these people for freely sharing this information in such a friendly and easy-to-learn manner. If you understand HTML, you'll soon grasp Perl especially if you visit these sites! Get into it! :)

   

Completed update of Cybersite with extra Javascript to handle browser and screen resolution detection. As I am an open-source supporter, I wanted to extend some support for those who back this worthwhile cause by adding in some extra features available only to open-source Mozilla users. The site has alo been upgraded to use the partial-transparency PNG format defined by the W3C, although this is only available to Netscape and Mozilla users since MSIE (and Opera I think) doesn't yet support it. MSIE and Opera users will notice little difference to the site, with the notable exception of the Gallery. The Gallery has now been updated to detect your screen resolution and resize the images accordingly, so those with screen resolutions less than 1600 x 1200 (which I believe is still most people) now won't get those horrid horizontal scrollbars and huge pics bigger than the screen. You can also click on the image to see just the picture without any backdrop or surrounding html, or you can right click and Save Target As... to just download it straight to your machine. Much better! :)

   

Now this one's an interesting read... I've been arguing for some time now that the drop in population growth in the West is largely due to the excesses of feminism and the societal bias against men, which has discouraged men from wanting to have kids... one of the reasons I won't have them is because I don't want to risk losing them in a divorce case! Well, here at last is someone who has the guts to agree with me - and a woman, at that!

(SNIP)
Young women aren't free to choose when to have children because their men aren't interested. Men are too self-absorbed, too career-oriented. That's the latest suggestion to emerge in the ongoing debate on fertility, where men are being scolded for failing to shoulder the collective responsibility of a declining birthrate.

Why should men be interested in fathering children?

Confronted with the very strong societal message that children do fine without fathers, is it so surprising that some men may decide the risks of having children are just too high?

Every week we see pregnant celebrities or soap opera stars flaunting their decision to bear children on their own. There's a howl of outrage when governments attempt to confine access to IVF services to families with fathers. Children do just fine without fathers, is the constant refrain.

All you need is love, mother love. The message is clear: fathers are disposable. But surely this makes taking on the job of the throwaway father a mug's game?
(/SNIP)

Read more here.

   

Seems like Google might be turning into a bit of a monster! This little caveat from Google-Watch.org describes some interesting pieces of behaviour on the part of Google:

(SNIP)
Google is easily top dog. They provide about 75 percent of the external referrals for most websites. If you count Google's partners as part of the mix (particularly Yahoo and AOL), this figure is closer to 85 percent. There is no point in putting up a website apart from Google. It's do or die with Google. If we're all very lucky, one of the other three will offer some competition within a year or two. If we're not lucky, we will be uploading our websites to Google's servers by then, much like the bloggers do at blogger.com (which was bought by Google in 2003). It would mean the end of the web as we know it.
(/SNIP)

Hey, I'm a blogger! Makes doing stuff like this so easy and convenient! But it's just as well there are those who help us to see what's going on behind the scenes, too. Check it out here.

   

Gentoo Linux ROCKS!!!

This blog post is being made from Mozilla running under the Gentoo Linux 2.4 kernel and XFCE. The move away from Microsoft has begun! Spent today setting up Linux to access my Windows partitions and emerging software. Ah, emerge.

Windows: To Install a new program: Type a twenty-digit serial code. Enter all your personal details. Click I Agree, click Next...Next....Next....Next...Install. Do nothing while installing. Click No to the readme....Finish. Reboot. Wait. Register...Enter all your personal details again. Work through supplier's website. Eventually get to run the program.

Gentoo: To Install a new program: Click Terminal. Type 'emerge [program name]'. Surf net and listen to music while installing. Finished installing - run program now.

Installed Mozilla, Thunderbird, Abiword, The Gimp, ATanks, and all free!
You have to treat Linux as a new operating system. You can't compare it to Windows - it's like comparing apples and oranges, as the saying goes. It's a new world, and it awakens parts of the brain you haven't used in years...

   

Phew, it's been a busy couple of weeks! What with getting ready for the Work for the Dole scheme and rebuilding my computer I've had to neglect my 'blog! :( Still, it's all been worth it... I now have 180GB of space on my computer with the addition of a new 120 GB hard drive. And I'm making another big transition too; I now have Gentoo Linux installed on my machine and my pal NutterPC is assisting me with the setting it up (Yes, I'm leaning on him to get his site done for the NGADLA Group page as well! It IS coming, so hang in there!). It seems that Gentoo and ATI don't get along very well when you bring multimonitor into the equation... but it will work out eventually!

I start my Work for the Dole project hopefully next week... and I'm hoping I'll get a half-decent job out of this! More on this as information about what I'm actually doing becomes available...

   

Well, it's been a busy Easter weekend for the Mystikan! After being hauled up to my parents' place for the weekend I went to a barbecue in the park on Good Friday with my family and sister's work colleagues. Yours truly won a sixpack in the Easter Bunny Hop race - not for coming first, but for getting down on all fours like a real rabbit instead of just jumping along with hands held up in front! Well, I've shot enough bunnies to know what they hop like... Yes, I know, I know, and the sixpack just made it worse! So loads of fun was had by all, as can plainly be seen in the shots here...

So we all descend upon the park...

Prawns, chops and snags on the barbie... mmmmm, prawns....

The egg-and-spoon races were fun... and messy!

   

Finally, after much brain leakage, the template has been finalised and set up... Let the games begin! :)

   

So begins the saga of Mystikan's blog... After experiencing some trouble getting this thing working with my web page on Internode's server, I finally have it up and running. I need to adjust the template so it reasonably matches the appearance of the rest of Mystikan's Cybersite, and once this is done we're on our way!